Rising Road: April 2012

The story of three students travelling through Italy.

The greatest skill a man can have is the ability to pull himself up by his bootstraps. The morning of March 25th, I took that about as literally as one can. The night before, I stayed up past sunrise (watching my Baylor Bears in March Madness), but planned on hitting the hay at about 17:00 to get a full night's sleep before our 3:00 (or 2:00 since the clocks jumped forward that night) shuttle to the airport. I won't say that worked out for me, so when I did wake up and got my boots on, those straps are what dragged me out of bed: a small price to pay for all the goodness to follow.

Touching down at around 10:00 local time, we heard a bugle blast that my freshly woken self thought signalled the beginning of our imminent demise following a short bout of prayer. Apparently that's actually Ryanair's cue for having arrived on time or early. That means not only did one person think it was a good idea to have a bugle call on a plane, but several high paid people thought it was a good idea to have a bugle call on a plane. I was awestruck. Then we got off the plane, and I realized what awestruck really meant (a common motif throughout this trip). It was 70* and beautifully sunny outside. Let me emphasize this: the highest temperature I'd seen in Scotland was 57* (on one or two rare occasions). One more for emphasis: SCOTLAND! The place where it is so wet, cold, and dreary that they have a word just to describe how uniquely miserable the weather is (that would be dreich)

To get things rolling, here is a crude map of what we saw.

Day 1

Moving on to the splendours of Rome, we caught a bust to Termini, which is a few blocks from our hostel, which is hidden in an alley way and located on the 5th floor, 116 steps up, in an apartment complex (Ares Rooms is the name, and I would recommend it to anyone without a second thought). Seeing as how we were not the most well rested, we lugged our stuff there, checked in, and hauled our hind quarters to the Capitoline Museum: with a little getting lost, and a healthy amount of wandering and wondering. There's something about looking both ways to cross a street, and being confronted with the Colosseum that just takes one aback for a moment. Turn the other direction, and you could be staring down the face of Trajan's Column/Forum. After a sufficient amount of navigation we made it to the museum, which would be spectacular on a normal day. This day however, was one of those falling in the Lux in Arcana, a special release of Vatican Archive documents including correspondence of Henry VIII, the Papal Bull canonizing St. Francis, and two of my favorites: the Diet of Werms, and the Papal Bull excommunicating Martin Luther. Unfortunately there were no pictures allowed. After a few hours there and with deteriorating weather, we decided to make a quick trip to the Trevi Fountain, then take a few hours to nap back at Ares: at 17:00. It took some motivation to get up and go eat dinner (which is sadly, the only artichoke I ate all week).

Above: La Vittoria

Left & Right: Trevi Fountain

Day 2

After our one rainy afternoon, the warm, sunny weather came back to stay. Our second morning entailed waking up early (so early our extremely accommodating landlord/manager/receptionist/chef made us promise that he would only have to get our breakfast ready that early the one time) and grabbing the metro to just North of Vatican City. Naturally, it follows that we would go to the Vatican (and for once, things happened as one would think). I'm not going to pretend that I can describe the Vatican or St. Peter's Basilica. I'm also not going to pretend any pictures would suffice. That being said, I'll give you both anyway. Getting in to the Vatican looked like it would take a year or so when in fact, once they opened the doors, it took 15 minutes, and that was without the overpriced tour salesmen. Walking through those drab, ancient walls is like walking through C.S. Lewis's wardrobe. The imagination cannot spell the wonders of the thousands of years of history stowed in this place. Every culture humanity has witnessed is represented: especially Greco-Roman sculpture. The Laocoon is just there. Under a portico in one of the courtyards, only barred from millions of eyes by a small rope, three feet away from its base. That was just the beginning. Of course, at the end is the Sistine Chapel which occupied around 30 minutes of our time. Between those two lay the School at Athens, Creation, and the list just goes on.
For lunch, we settled on Old Bridge Gelateria, which reputidly stays open late because Blessed John Paul II would go there for night time gelato. If it's good enough for that man, it's more than good enough for me (but I will say he had good taste in gelato).
St. Peter's was beyond words. John Paul II lies entombed to the right, where people pray before him (myself included), and just before that is Michaelangelo's Pieta, sheer catharsis and unbridled emotion freed from the marble that held it.

Above: The Academy

Right: Laocoon

Above: Creation

Left: Pieta

Below: Tomb of John Paul II

Left: St Peter's Square
Right: Castel Sant'Angelo

Dinner that night involved trekking out to the West of the Tiber to hunt down dinner at a place called Dai Due Cicchioni, the single greatest meal anyone could eat. The chef, Gianni, founded the small kitchen decades ago, and to this day, he has no menu and speaks no English. What he cooks is what you eat (lavishly). We had a bottle of unlabelled red wine and a four course meal of brochette, three types of pasta, chicken cutlets, and a dessert of cookies and chocolates with limoncello and an Italian eu-de-vie. Unfortunately (or fortunately), only two of the three of us were willing to consume anything alcoholic. Naturally, we didn't want to waste anything. The laughter and good cheer that night was the only thing that could rival the taste of Gianni's masterpiece.

Day 3

Here was our long day: the day with five miles on the itinerary. We got started a little later than we wanted, but the rest was welcome. We headed out to San Pietro in Vincoli, which houses a Michaelangelo of Moses and the chains that held St. Peter. From there we got to the two hour line at the Coloseum after a brief glimpse around the Baths of Trajan. As we began waiting in the line, we noticed another set of empty ropes: one for Roma Pass holders (like ourselves). The wait was the approximate amount of time it took to walk through said ropes. I'm not going to go into great detail about the hundreds of monuments to the majesty of Rome and (eventually, though in a skewed way, from the beginning) God. There are just too many. So from the Colosseum (which specifically had a sign prohibiting climbing and dashing my buildering hopes), we went through the Forum Romano before walking past the starkly contrasting architecture of the Theatre of Marcellus on our way to Tiber Island, which now houses a hospital on top of the ruins of a temple to Asclepius (Roman god of healing). We decided to picnic on Tiber Island, beside the river. After much gesticulation and overuse of the words "piccolo" (which means small) and "prego" (which means whatever you want it to mean), we managed to get some salami and cheese at a friendly butcher who went out of his way to help us (undoubtedly after seeing two pretty girls walk through his doors). A quick trip to a local produce market later, and we were lounging by the river with the first of what would be a tradition of picnics. From there we went into the Pantheon, grabbed gelato with an old friend of one of our group members, then swung by the Column of Marcus Aurelius on our way to the lack-luster Mausoleum of Augustus (lack-luster mostly because it is off limits to the public). By this point our feet were a-hurtin' for sure, and I swear I had lost a layer of leather from my soles. Luckily we were a short walk from Piazza del Popolo, so we passed through there on our way up to the Villa Borghese (a massive and beautiful park at the NE of Rome) where we sat by a fountain/pond long enough to start nodding off into a peaceful nap. Unfortunately, the light was beginning to fade, so we headed down to Piazza di Spagna and its Spanish Steps just in time to encounter the first of many random bouts of mass cheering. We stumbled our way to Santa Maria della Vittoria to view St. Teresa in Ecstasy before stopping by a pizza/kebab for dinner since apparently I was the only one hungry: until we spent about an hour in the room. The following might be slightly boastful, but I'd like to do my part to keep chivalry (or common courtesy, where I come from) alive, so I got redressed, threw my boots on without socks, and made the trip around the back alleyway back to the pizza/kebab to get dinner for one of my hungry companions.